Can we talk about inequality?

Why is it that so many journalists and academics — me included — are preoccupied with inequality and yet the political parties give it the brush-off?

Two high-profile journalists — Linda McQuaig and Chrystia Freeland, each of whom has written a book about inequality — have declared themselves as candidates for Bob Rae’s old seat of Toronto-Centre.

If they win their respective nominations — McQuaig wants to run for the NDP and Freeland for the Liberals — it might not just be the Conservatives who look on in bemusement. It might also be their respective leaders, Thomas Mulcair and Justin Trudeau.

Just this week, Mulcair once again ruled out any increases in personal taxes, which means his election platform in 2015 will likely make only the most modest flick at redistribution.

Although Trudeau has coupled a progressive, youthful image to a rhetorical concern with the plight of the middle class, his economic program — what he’s revealed of it — has been pretty conservative. Canadian Business magazine even crowed that Trudeau “might be better for business than Stephen Harper.”

One answer to this puzzle might be that there is no inequality problem in Canada — at least not on the scale that has troubled other industrialized countries. It has to be said that, while the OECD has documented a growth in inequality across the industrialized world — including Canada — it is clearly substantially worse in the United States.

Both Freeland’s book, Plutocrats: the Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, and McQuaig’s, The Trouble with Billionaires: How the Super-rich Hijacked the World (and how We Can Take it Back), are concerned with global trends that are more visible and more acute south of the border.

It’s clear from survey data that Canadians do not have the faith they once did in government’s ability to solve problems.

The disproportion in wealth between the richest and the poorest in greater in the U.S. than in Canada, and has grown more quickly over the last 30 years. There is less poverty in Canada. And our social programs have not been as aggressively gutted, which means the negative consequences of inequality may not be as great.

The University of Ottawa economist, Miles Corak, who has emerged as a leading global expert in this field, has carefully documented the decline in social mobility in Canada and the United States, and shown that while it is happening in both countries, the trend has been less dramatic here. He nonetheless believes it is a formidable problem for Canadians.

For two hundred years or so, market economies have shown themselves capable of astonishing growth. They also have been prone to levels of inequality that can fracture societies, and to periodic financial crashes and recessions. Perhaps Canadians look south of the border and feel like they’ve dodged a bullet.

But there is another, more narrowly political calculation by the Liberals and the NDP at play.

The pollster Darrell Bricker has co-authored a book with the journalist John Ibbitson arguing that there is an emerging conservative majority in Canada. This week Bricker tweeted that the Liberals would be wrong to emphasize inequality because the middle class “wants low taxes, less government, (and) law and order. For them, it’s not about wealth distribution.”

This may be overstated, but it’s clear from survey data that Canadians do not have the faith they once did in government’s ability to solve problems. This is rooted in the failure of governments to manage the economic problems of the 1970s and 1980s in the way the public had grown accustomed to during the 1950s and 1960s.

In the case of the Liberals, they re-oriented themselves in the 1990s from a party of government activism to one mainly concerned with reining in government spending, getting the deficit down, and even cutting tax rates.

They also draw much of their current support — more than the Conservatives do — from the university-educated, many of whom have actually benefited to some degree from growing inequality.

The NDP, meanwhile, does not have the financial or organizational resources to mimic the Obama Democrats and get out the votes of the poor, the poorly educated and the working class. Instead, they have made a decision to compete with the Liberals for the shrinking pool of mainly middle-class voters in the rest of Canada, as they have already done successfully in Quebec.

The jaundiced view of government Bricker has identified is unlikely to change — unless it is challenged directly by opposition politicians. Certainly, our current obsession with political scandal doesn’t help, even if it weakens the Harper Conservatives in the short term.

I don’t know whether Freeland and McQuaig can really get the debate about inequality properly underway on the stump. But it would be a good thing if they did.

[Editorial note: An earlier version of this column mistakenly implied that the economist Stephen Gordon does not view inequality in Canada as a problem. The comment was based on my reading of his recent Maclean’s column. Professor Gordon has informed me that my inference was incorrect and I regret the error.]

Follow Paul Adams on Twitter @padams29

Paul Adams is a veteran of the CBC, the Globe and Mail and EKOS Research. He has taught political science at the University of Manitoba and journalism at Carleton, where he is an associate professor. His new book Power Trap, on the dilemma of Canada’s opposition parties, was published in September.

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